Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @11:41PM
from the so-easy-it-builds-itself dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on have released research detailing how molecules in chips can self-assemble, potentially reducing manufacturing costs. The researchers have developed a technique in which polymers automatically fall into place to create an integrated circuit."

I guess it's out of our hands in much the same way as that Connect 4 token's final resting place is 'out of our hands' once we put it in the slot. Polymers falling into place is not the same as 'self-replicating intelligent life form'. Come back in a few million years and see if they've evolved!

This is a really hot topic in research right now. For my final year project on my physics degree I am investigating a theory of a model fluid with a repulsive step potential and it's amazing what kind of self assembly you get on a mesoscopic level.

At certain temperatures and pressures the molecules will all just spontaneously line up into stripes or clusters. This could have amazingly useful applications in chip assembly, because you don't need to assemble the chip any more - you just engineer a molecule that assembles itself into the right shape.

I'd be interested to know how closely this links with protein structure and self-assembly. It's called secondary and tertiary (and, to a degree, quartenary) structure with proteins and occurs thousands of times a second in living cells, self-catalysed and at room (or body) temperature in most cases: relatively simple long-chain molecules composed from only 20 possible different elements (amino acids) will become incredibly complex structures capable of anything from incredible structural strength to active

This particular project may not be that closely linked, but much of the self-assembly research going on currently (by Erik Winfree et. al.) uses biological materials (DNA, proteins) as the building blocks.

Part of this is because some of the target applications involve interactions with biological systems (people, bacteria, etc.) and part is because DNA manufacturing is well-studied and powerful (in a computational sense).

seriously, guys. mod parent up. it's important to ask the right questions from time to time, even if you have no idea how to begin to answer. What is the difference between a virus and a selfassembling chip? dump their seed in the right environment, and they start eating. or something like that.

Indeed. Mod parent up, look what happened to the illustrious US manufacturing industry. Its still going strong, but only employs about 5% of the bodies that it used to.

As more and more modern tech automates everything around us we're going to be forced to either move to a socialist government type or suffer the consequences of everyone being unemployed, hungry, and pissed off.

Or they could just make the chips radiation hardened to begin with... oh, wait, you're talking about "magic" technologies like in the movies. Yeah - anti-EMP adaptive technology because radiation hardening is too easy and you need something that can kill the baddies, right?

This is a piece of useless article just for some kind of publicity. Let me put more interesting one for who have been tricked in to this thread for more information about polymer self assembly [eetimes.com].

Maybe it's because this isn't such a new thing (according to previous posters) but it seems to be that the average post length for this story seems to be very low and they're all about one SciFi-esque self-sustaining robotic race or another. I mean, come on, if you've been following/. here with Religious-like or even RSS-like regularity, you would have seen how we are raising our own AI in it's own little sandboxed area compelete with environm